﻿The annual lecture this year was given by Professor Alice T. Friedman, the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of American Art and the Director of the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College.

The lecture focused on collaborations between architects, artists, artisans, and photographers in midtwentieth-century America, highlighting some of the most significant buildings and interior environments created as a result of their efforts. Motivated in some cases by the High Modernist theory of a "Synthesis of the Arts," and in others by a desire, particularly on the part of corporate clients, to create memorable and spectacular experiences for visitors, projects such as Eliel and Eero Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center (Warren, Michigan, 1956) or Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi's Pan Am Building (New York City, 1963) were filled with works of art, furniture, and multi-media installations by well-known figures as Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Anton Pevsner, Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Lippold, and Harry Bertoia.

Using techniques of landscape design, urban planning, hghting, and photography to create carefully choreographed vistas, pathways, and bodily experiences, these complexes remain important both as examples of modern architectural and design on a grand scale, and as historical case-studies demonstrating an extraordinary commitment of money, time, and resources to the production of civic, corporate, and private space.﻿

Professor Friedman's publications include American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (2010), Women and the Making of the Modern House (2007), and House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (1989).